Financials

Is Apple's share price being manipulated?

There's something very fishy about the weekly options market. Is it time to reel in the bad guys?

It was 3:48 p.m. on Friday April 29 and traders who had purchased Apple (AAPL) April 29 $350 "calls" -- options that gave them the right to buy Apple shares in blocks of 100 for $350 per share -- were sitting pretty. The stock was trading around $353.50 and those calls were worth MORE

Apple's sleepiest day of the year

Trading in the company's shares Monday was slower than it's been since New Year's Eve, 2010

Apple (AAPL) has been trading in a narrow band this year -- to the undying frustration of investors who think the stock's price ought to reflect the company's breakneck earnings growth (EPS up 75%, 68%, 75% and 92%, respectively, over the past four quarters).

Apple's trading volume, by contrast, is as changeable as a baby's bottom, MORE

Apple is No. 4 in Barron's 500

Moves up from 59th place in 2010 based on boffo sales growth and return on investment

In what Barron's describes as "a tip of the hat"  to the corporations that generated the most revenue growth and cash returns in recent years, the magazine moved Apple (AAPL) up 55 spots in its 13th annual ranking of America's 500 largest companies that aren't currently in bankruptcy.

"While such operating success might not generate immediate MORE

Apple hits No. 35 in Fortune 500

Up 21 slots from 2009. If ranked by profits, rather than revenues, it would be No. 8

Apple (AAPL) catapulted into the top 50 U.S. companies in the 2011 edition of the Fortune 500 released Friday. The rankings are based on revenues from the most recent fiscal year -- in Apple's case, the one that ended Sept. 2010. If profits had been the criterion, Apple would have come in eighth, right MORE

An orgy of last-minute AAPL trades

Someone sold 6 million shares at $348.24 as Apple put the NASDAQ-100 rebalance behind it

Apple investors had been dreading Friday's close since early April, when NASDAQ announced that starting May 2, Apple's share of the NASDAQ-100, one of the world's most heavily traded stock indexes, would be reduced from 20.5% to 12.3%.

All 100 stocks in the index were to be affected by the so-called Special Rebalance, but none as much MORE

Jobs' net is bigger than Ballmer's

For the first time in decades, Apple's net income has overtaken Microsoft's

One by one, the bragging rights are going Steve Jobs' way.

In May 2010, Apple's (AAPL) market cap passed Microsoft's (MSFT).
In October, Apple overtook Microsoft in total revenue.
On Thursday, when Microsoft reported its earnings for the March quarter, Steve Ballmer lost what edge he still had. Microsoft's net income for calendar Q1 2011 was $5.23 billion. Apple's was $5.99 billion.

Also MORE

About Apple's P/E ratio

In 2007, it was trading for nearly 50 times earnings. Today it's 16.7. What happened?

I hate to quote Horace Dediu twice in one day, but sometimes it can't be helped.

Wednesday's post on his Asymco blog features the chart at right, which plots Apple's (AAPL) share price (blue line) over the past four and a half years set against multiples of earnings (15 x EPS, 25 x EPS, etc.). The chart MORE

An Apple VP's $13.7 million payday

The head of hardware engineering sold 99% of his beneficially owned shares on Monday

Steve Jobs may be content to let his 5,546,451 shares of Apple (AAPL) rise and fall with the vagaries of the stock market, but some of his executive staff are a bit more attentive to their holdings.

One of the more pro-active traders is Bob Mansfield, Apple's senior vice president in charge of Mac and iPhone hardware engineering. MORE

7 fun facts about Apple's cash

The company finished fiscal Q2 with $65.8 billion in cash and marketable securities

Asymco's Horace Dediu, who is a master at these things, has charted Apple's (AAPL) growing cash hoard and offered some comparisons to put it in perspective. I quote:

The funds are big enough to place Apple's CFO office in the top 100 largest fund managers in the world and larger than any hedge fund manager.
Cash growth in one quarter MORE

AAPL: The Street never says it's sorry

Most professional analysts blew it in Q2, but you wouldn't know it from their post-mortems

Horace Dediu, who writes a blog called Asymco and was featured in this space last fall for the uncanny accuracy of his Apple (AAPL) earnings estimates, was beating himself up Thursday morning for missing the company's Q2 2011 iPad unit sales number so badly. Even though his iPhone estimate was the best of the 48 analysts MORE